Little Dragons CafeReview

I’ve been up until 5 a.m. for three nights in a row, trapped in a loop of fishing for eels, exploring the forest, and feeding my (hopefully) harmless dragon heaps of food in an effort to turn him blue. This is all, ostensibly, in the interest of running a café and saving my mother. The details are hazy. But even when the controls get in the way and the repetition sets in, I’m still enjoying my time as a lost boy.

If it sounds a bit like a weird-world farming sim, that’s because it is. Little Dragons Cafe is helmed by Yasuhiro Wada, the creator of Harvest Moon, Rune Factory, and Little King’s Story. Like its addicting siblings, it’s all about the simple but rewarding tasks of gathering ingredients, building relationships, and earning money. But Little Dragons Cafe is its own beast, with pleasing storybook graphics, a much slower pace, dozens of hours of gameplay, and much, much lower stakes. In fact, it may be the only game of its type where there’s no money at all. Just better ingredients, baby.

Exit Theatre Mode

Instead of forcing anxiety-inducing decisions each day, like deciding between wooing romantic partners or mining in caves, your job is to simply collect ingredients and improving the café’s menu. There are no tools to upgrade or festivals to attend. Learning recipes, the crux of the progression system, is done through straightforward exploration of new areas or talking to the employees. To cook a new recipe you play a short but actually fairly difficult rhythm-based mini-game. Using the best ingredients—and nailing the timing—raises your bed-and-breakfast’s reputation, and that means more guests – which is apparently good, for some unspecified reason.

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The story is nonsensical, but I can’t stop thinking about it.

The story is nonsensical, but I can’t stop thinking about it thanks to a dozen weird, unshakeable details. Take, for instance, the dragon’s “manure” — it’s a precious resource that speeds up crop production that’s collected right from the dragon’s bed… sometimes while they’re still sleeping in it. Or the old wizard who brazenly appears in the house, tells the children their comatose mother is half dragon, then spends each day standing at the foot of her bed, leaving the unsupervised children to their own horrifying paternal conclusions.

Despite the silly and slightly disturbing plot, everything else in Little Dragons Cafe feels designed to put you at ease. You don’t need to painstakingly water crops or feed your dragon every hour, for example – there’s not a hint of time pressure. Plus, unlike virtually every other farming sim, Little Dragons Cafe doesn’t punish you for burning the candle at both ends. You can stay out until 4 a.m. and you’ll still only sleep in an extra hour or so. But you shouldn’t, and the reason is simple: it doesn’t help you.

Exit Theatre Mode

No matter how many ingredients you collect or “Supreme” dishes you cook, the plot progresses at its own pace. If you’re trying to complete the story in record time, you’d be better off going to bed as soon as you’ve stocked up your kitchen and reached your story goals for the day, which has been early in my experience. When you get stuck, those goals can be helpfully checked in the menu. They range from the slightly obscure – “Check in on the café after lunch” – to the explicit: “Collect recipe fragments by talking to Rosetta and the hunter in the forest.” For the most part these hints aren’t necessary, but they’re nice to reference when you’re stuck.

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Some of the tasks you’ll repeat hundreds of times just don’t feel quite right.

As you progress, your dragon transforms. You can change his color by feeding him certain meals, and he’ll grow several times throughout the story. The larger he becomes, the more he can help. Yes, he becomes a bit less cute, when he ages — but he learns to hunt, bust up large obstacles, and help you reach areas around the map that were previously inaccessible. Each action he performs chips away a small piece of his stamina bar, but it can easily be replenished by feeding him one of the dozens of meals you’ve prepared. But even when the map grows to full size, exploring it is never as fun as it should be.

That’s because some of the tasks you’ll repeat hundreds (or even thousands) of times just don’t feel quite right. You often get stuck on ledges that appear as though they should be easily jumped over. Hunting with your dragon, especially, is a pain because you need to get close to the beasts, then press the right button when the prompt arises. Problem is, by the time you’re close enough, most of the time those beasts have seen you—and if the beasts see you, they’ll tackle you, stealing one of your dishes. You can avoid virtually any repercussion by just not carrying meals when you hunt... but then you won’t be able to replenish your dragon’s stamina on the fly. Of course, after putting significant hours into exploring and gathering you’ll have so many ingredients that you probably won’t care if you lose a few.

The Verdict

With a breezy pace and a comically weird story, Little Dragons Cafe is a unique take on farming sims. While I loved cooking meals, establishing my inn, and the anxiety-free pace, its management mechanics have been watered down just a bit too much and result in stakes so low that much of it becomes meaningless. Without making important decisions or a wealth of more interesting side-quests to capture my attention, I eventually ended up bored by the repetitive tasks.